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ASUS is looking to increase the appeal of its ROG (Republic Of Gamers) brand beyond just the aesthetics and specifications of its products. Through the launch of ROG Arena's Elite Rewards program, ASUS is looking to materialize users' belief in their ROG products through rewards and a loyalty system, which should a) get ROG customers even more into ASUS' products and b) increase user recognition of ROG as a brand.

Elite Rewards, as the name implies, is a reward program for users, with a scoring system that differentiates customers between Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond tiers, each with increasing rewards. Users can increase their ROG Elite score through Battle (gaming) feats, Adventuring (going to ASUS' events), Craft (earning points through ASUS' content creation contests) and by purchasing select ROG products. All of these activities give a player points towards their Elite rewards tier and the rewards they can redeem, while also increasing a player's standing in the ROG Arena leaderboard.

Intel is on the verge of launching its 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" processor family with six SKUs, and its top-tier Z370 Express chipset, early next month. Those looking for cheaper motherboards and don't intend on overclocking their processor, will have to wait until the first quarter of 2018, with the company confirming Q1-2018 as the launch window of three of its client-desktop chipsets for 8th generation Core processors, in a leaked Desktop outlook slide, scored by GamersNexus.

Among the new desktop chipsets launched will be the H370 Express, B360 Express, and the H310 Express. The H370 Express offers essentially the same platform connectivity as the Z370 Express, minus CPU overclocking and NVIDIA SLI certification. The B360 Express has a slimmer connectivity loadout, and lacks SLI support, but its predecessors have been generally preferred by gamers wanting to build single-GPU rigs with CPUs running at stock speeds, which is why major motherboard brands have built gamer-centric motherboards on B-series chipsets. The H310 chipset has the lightest connectivity, and is designed to power entry-level motherboards.

A recent AMD roadmap leak showed the company's "tick", process-improved plans for 2018's Zen+, as well as its painter-imbued aspirations with Zen 2 in 2019. Now, there's some new info posted by DigiTimes that's being sourced straight from motherboard makers that points to the company's Pinnacle Ridge launch being set sometime in February 2018.

This information seems to have been delivered to the motherboard makers straight from AMD itself, as a heads-up for when they should be expecting to ramp up production of next-generation chipsets. Sources report that AMD will follow their Summit Ridge, Ryzen launch, with the initial release of Pinnacle 7 in February, followed by the mid-range Pinnacle 5 and entry-level Pinnacle 3 processors in March 2018. DigiTimes also reports that AMD is expecting to see its share of the desktop CPU market return to at least 30% in the first half of 2018 which, coeteris paribus, is more of a simple mathematical progression than clarvoyance.

Intel could launch the first wave of 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" desktop processors in the retail channel, on the 5th of October, 2017. It's also becoming ominous that with increasing core counts across the lineup, Intel is also raising prices by anywhere between 12.5 to 25 percent. For example, the Core i7-8700K, which logically succeeds the $339 Core i7-7700K, could be priced upwards of $400. The i5-8600K, which succeeds the $249 i5-7600K, could be priced a little over $300. One can expect similar price-hikes across the board for other Core i5 six-core and Core i3 quad-core SKUs.

The first wave of 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" desktop processor launches could be limited to certain overclocker-specific Core i7 and Core i5 SKUs. It is also launching just one compatible motherboard chipset option with this first wave, the Z370 Express, which supports CPU overclocking. Among the SKUs to look out for, are the top-dog Core i7-8700K six-core processor with HyperThreading enabling 12 threads, 12 MB of L3 cache; and the Core i5-8600K, which is also a six-core part but lacks HyperThreading, and comes with 9 MB of L3 cache.

In a Forbes interview conducted by Anthony Leather, AMD officials Senior Vice President and General Manager Jim Anderson, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Marketing John Taylor, Sarah Youngbauer of AMD's communications team, and James Prior, AMD's Senior Product Manager, have shed some light on the development process for AMD's equivalent of a flash hit - their HEDT, HCC Threadripper chips. Threadripper, which leverages AMD's Zen architecture used in their Ryzen and EPYC processors, makes use of an MCM design with up to 16 cores and 32 threads, with AMD's svelte Zen, 8-core base units linked through the company's high speed interconnect Infinity Fabric.

This has allowed the company to scale designs from four core processors with Ryzen 3, all the way towards the current cream of the crop Threadripper 1950X. It's an extremely scalable design, which brings with it improved yields and some pretty significant cost savings for AMD due to smaller dies. This, in turn, means the company is able to more agressively price their Ryzen and Threadripper processors compared to the competition, at least when it comes to high core and thread counts for the same price bracket - and the success of that business decision is showing.For our forum lurkers, this article is marked as an editorial.

Overclockers UK staff member Gibbo, who posted the renowned British company's Vega stocks and deals for the red team's graphics cards, has just come out with something that might put our inner buyers to attention. Apparently, AMD has allowed launch prices to be as they currently are ($499 for the Vega 64 and $399 for the Vega 56 in the Americas; £549 for the Vega 64 in the UK) through rebates and other offers to retailers, who, according to Gibbo, couldn't keep those prices at all if that was not the case. According to the Overclockers UK staffer, " (...) the good news is AMD are rebating early launch sales to allow us to hit £449.99 on the stand alone black card which has no games. This is a launch only price which AMD at present are saying will be withdrawn in the near future, when if it happens is unknown, but remember do not be shocked if the price jumps nearly £100 in a few days. This time around there is no early adopter tax, quite the opposite on the stand alone black card, so do be quick."

Disclaimer: take this post with a bucket of salt. However, the information here, if true, could heavily impact AMD's RX Vega cards' stock at launch and in the subsequent days, so, we're sharing this so our readers can decide on whether they want to pull the trigger for a Vega card at launch, as soon as possible, or risk what would seem like the equivalent of a mining Black Friday crowd gobbling up AMD's RX Vega models' stock. Remember that AMD has already justified delays for increased stock so as to limit the impact of miners on the available supply.

The information has been put out by two different sources already. The first source we encountered (and which has been covered by some media outlets solo) has been one post from one of OC UK's staff, Gibbo, who in a forum post, said "Seems the hash rate on VEGA is 70-100 per card, which is insanely good. Trying to devise some kind of plan so gamers can get them at MSRP without the miners wiping all the stock out within 5 minutes of product going live."

Disclaimer things first: take this with a grain of salt, since this hasn't seen the amount of confirmations we'd like. 3D Center has come out with a table that supposedly demonstrates the schedule of RX Vega manufacturing and integration work from AMD's add-in-board partners (which includes the likes of Sapphire, XFX, PowerColor, and others.) Remember that manufacturers receive a suggested reference design from AMD as to how to incorporate their GPUs into an actually operable graphics card, with varying degrees of customization according to the particular partner we're talking about. And this process takes time.

According to the leaked schedule, the BOM (Bill Of Materials) for the required parts to properly manufacture an RX Vega graphics card was to be released sometime in June, with engineering validation tests going through the end of June towards the beginning of this month (July.) Actual working samples from AIB partners are scheduled to be available in the middle of this month, with product validation tests (PVT) stretching towards the beginning of August (you'll remember AMD has confirmed they'll be formally announcing the RX Vega graphics card(s) at SIGGRAPH 2017, which stretches through July 30th and August 3rd.)

With AMD's Threadripper family just a few weeks away from launch, it appears we are already getting some preliminary benchmark results in via both Geekbench and SiSoft Sandra benchmarks. This latest set of leaks isn't the first bench of the flagship 1950X, but it is the newest and thus should give us a more accurate picture of present optimizations.

Interestingly, the single core performance dropped a bit on GeekBench, from 4216 to 4074. It made up for it in multi-threading however, where the chip posted a result of 26768, up from 24723. Sadly, these numbers still pale in comparison to the 10-core i9-7900X, in both single threaded and multi-threaded figures. As the 1950X ships with significantly lower clocks compared to the i9-7900X's clocks (with boost considered, anyway), I suppose it truly will come down to whether these CPUs can close the gap via overclocking, or optimizations towards launch and beyond. Either way, it seems there may be a bit of a hill to climb to get there. Whether or not it is surmountable remains to be seen.

EVGA's product manager Jacob Freeman has just confirmed the launch day of EVGA's upcoming end-all-be-all GTX 1080 Ti Hybrid FTW3 video card: it's now a relatively set in stone July 10th. Expect immediate availability for the video card on that day, though for now, not even Freeman has an idea if it will be available for ordering outside of EVGA's own online website.

The GTX 1080 Ti Hybrid FTW3 makes use of a hybrid, air and water-cooling solution. The GPU die itself is cooled by an Asetek all-in-one closed-loop liquid cooler, while memory and VRM make do with a traditional heatsink and fan combination. This provides the benefit of liquid cooling on the GPU core without the added expense of a full-cover waterblock, thus bringing the pricing a little lower than full-coverage waterblocks, but with increased performance over a purely air-cooled part. The GTX 1080 Ti HYBRID FTW3 shares the same specs as the 1080 Ti SC2 HYBRID, Hydro Copper, and Hydro Copper SC2 graphics cards, with a 1,556 MHz base and 1,670 MHz boost clock, 11 Gbps GDDR5X memory and 2x 8-pin power connectors. Pricing or overclocking headroom weren't detailed at all.

In a series of tweets, the official Radeon RX Twitter (and AMD employees) have confirmed what we were already told: that the gaming version of the company's Vega architecture would make its debut at this year's SIGGRAPH. Also, when asked about the Frontier Edition's (lacking) gaming chops, AMD's Jason Evangelho has come out with the warning that we all expected, and that we ourselves conveyed here: "it's premature to worry about a product's gaming performance by judging a different product NOT optimized for gaming."

We've waited a long time already, why not just a few more days? SIGGRAPH will take place between July 30th and August 3rd.

A lucky customer has already gotten his hands on one of these coveted, sky-powered AMD graphics cards, and is currently in the process of setting up his system. Given the absence of review samples from AMD to any outlet - a short Vega Frontier Edition supply ensured so - there isn't any other real way to get impressions on this graphics card. As such, we'll be borrowing Disqus' user #define posts as a way to cover live pics and performance measurements of this card. Expect this post to be updated as new developments arise.

After some glamour shots of the card were taken (which really are justified by its unique color scheme), #define mentioned the card's build quality. After having installed the driver package (which, as we've covered today, includes both a developer and gaming path inside the drivers, granting increased performance in both workloads depending on the enabled driver profile, he is now about to conduct some testing on SPECViewperf and 3DMark, with both gaming and non gaming profiles.

AMD has unveiled the pricing scheme for its latest EPYC line of datacenter processors. In a series of graphs and tables at it's EPYC launch presentation, it outlined a comprehensive platform that it claims beats Intel on a performance per dollar basis across the entire 64 thread spectrum. What is known up to now in regards to pricing can be summarized in this nice table we have made for you below:

Today, AMD, along with its global ecosystem of server customers and partners, launched the EPYC 7000 series of high-performance datacenter processors. With up to 32 high-performance "Zen" cores and an unparalleled feature set, the record-setting AMD EPYC design delivers greater performance across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.

A report from HWBattle is making the rounds claiming that new information has surfaced on AMD's upcoming high-performance, consumer versions of the Vega architecture. According to these reports, Vega graphics cards will (at least initially) come in two different performance tiers. A top of the line GPU, Vega 10 (being identified as Vega XT), and a cut-down version of it, based on Vega 11 (which is being called Vega Pro). Graphics chips for graphics card integration are supposedly being shipped to partners as of this week.

HWBattle goes on to say that there will be a myriad of approaches to AMD's AIB partner designs around the Vega graphics chips, with multiple cooling solutions being worked on (which isn't surprising, really; graphics cards nowadays can see upwards of 4 different cooling designs for the same GPU, according to the use case the company is designing it for. HWBattle is also saying that Vega will be faster than the GTX 1080, though there's no information on whether this only applies to the top-tier GPU or no. Other details are scant, scarce, or nonexistent; it would seem that the launch delay from AMD has sapped some of the interest surrounding Vega.

EK Water Blocks, the market leader in PC custom liquid cooling, is launching its new brand created for PC gamers called EK Fluid Gaming. Bringing the best price/performance ratio imaginable, it's set to change how water cooling is perceived. This is real EKWB water cooling at an affordable price thanks to innovative patent pending technology.

The benefits of liquid cooling of CPUs and especially GPUs have never been so obvious as air cooling solutions are struggling to cope with cooling demands of modern PC hardware. Air-cooled PCs tend to suffer from loud noise and overheating, something that no gamer wants to hear and see as it degrades performance of hardware, furthermore preventing any serious overclocking! Liquid cooling is the best solution for rapid heat removal due to its unmatched thermal heat dissipation. It is the only solution that allows successful heat removal from critical spots with zero noise pollution!

Recent reports mentioned Intel's moves to bring forward the launch of their Basin Falls HEDT platform, which succeeds their X99 platform. Intel is doing this in hopes to hold the blue flag against AMD's upcoming X399 Ryzen-based HEDT platform (there's seemingly a war in numbers here), pitting 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12-core CPUs against AMD's expected 12-core and 16-core processors.

As such, it's only natural motherboard makers would also have to expedite their work on X299-based motherboards, and it would seem that MSI has done just that, simultaneously advancing their marketing campaign. A teaser image from the company showcases an as-of-yet unreleased motherboard (not just any motherboard, but the "Best. Motherboard. Ever") which boasts of a trio of M.2 slots (with MSI's M.2 Shield thermal solution), and four PCIe x16 slots. Are you still counting the number of PCI lanes needed to drive all these slots? Well, it just so happens Intel's Basin Falls is expected to deliver up to 44 PCIe 3.0 lanes, so those should be enough to at least make this ridiculous amount of slots worthwhile... For some use cases. There's also an additional power-supply connector on top of the first PCIe slot, which should increase power delivery for these. It's almost open season on these HEDT platforms, kind sirs.

Fresh from the rumor-mill comes a report that low HBM2 availability may cripple the Vega launch that is expected to happen in the next few weeks, if a report from TweakTown is to be believed. As far as sources, there isn't much other than TweakTown's news report and their article claiming they had been told this by an "exclusive industry source." Apply your usual grain of salt here vigilant reader, but its certainly interesting speculation, if nothing else. It may turn out to be FUD, or it may turn out to be truth. Only the coming weeks will reveal the truth.

During its Q1 reports for fiscal year 2017 (which saw AMD's stock tumbling about, even if this Q1 only considers a single Ryzen sales-month on its accounts), AMD CEO Lisa Su referred that AMD's high-performance Vega architecture is still on track for a Q2 2017 release. The words, specifically, are these: "AMD's "Vega" GPU architecture is on track to launch in Q2, and has been designed from scratch to address the most data- and visually-intensive next-generation workloads with key architecture advancements including: a differentiated memory subsystem, next-generation geometry pipeline, new compute engine, and a new pixel engine."

So yes, AMD confirms what we suspected. This leaves a launch time-frame for Vega products until, at most, the end of June. Confirmation after confirmation, it's still a long time to wait, if you'll ask me, with little to no information in the last few months. But it's better than nothing, and I'd much prefer a real launch with retail availability than a glorified paper launch. Here's hoping Vega answers our questions and our needs. It's been a long time coming already.

Via Facebook, AMD has confirmed that Vega is nearly here - at least, as nearly here as a "this quarter" can be. This means Vega will launch in two-months time (Q2 extends through the months of April, May and June, after all.) Through a post on its Facebook page, AMD replied that Vega will be coming "when it's ready... And it will be this quarter."

According to previous leaks (and our own deep dive on Vega's architecture), Vega should go a long way towards bridging the power/performance gap between AMD and NVIDIA's GeForce series. It will be the first time since Fury that AMD will have a competitive, high-performance graphics design (expectedly, and hopefully, since no-one likes to buy over-priced graphics cards.) The fact that AMD has teased Vega in two different pieces of media that come out in May (Arkane Studios' Prey, which comes out on May 5th, and Alien: Covenant, which also comes out during the month of May.) I've previously posited that AMD wouldn't tease Vega's launch alongside one of the most promising games of the year without giving us the chance to power it through Vega come launch day, but as Prey's release date approaches and there is no more information on Vega (much less an announcement), it's looking increasingly likely that we'll have to wait until we can see that universe in all of its Vega-rendered glory.

Intel's upcoming Coffee Lake architecture, which is now all but confirmed to have been pulled forward by the company in an attempt to staunch the bleeding incurred from AMD's recently launched, table-turning Ryzen processors, has reared its head in SiSoftware. In some benchmarks, what is identified as a 6-core, 6-thread CPU from Intel surface, with a clockspeed @ 3.5 GHz, 1.5 MB L2 cache (256 Kb per core) and 9 MB L3 cache. This L3 cache is quite puzzling, considering how Intel's Kaby Lake architecture features 2 MB of L3 cache per core. If Coffee Lake were to keep most of Kaby Lake's design - which it will - then this chip should feature something along the lines of 12 MB L3 cache. The reduced amount of cache seems to scream at a disabled chip, but this could also be a case of a reporting error.

According to a report from Chinese website MyDrivers, NVIDIA is looking to spruce things up on its line-up with a much earlier than expected Q3 Volta Launch. Remember that Volta was expected, according to NVIDIA's own road-maps, to launch around early 2018. The report indicates that NVIDIA's Volta products - apparently to be marketed as the GeForce 20-series - will see an early launch due to market demands, and NVIDIA's intention to further increase pricing of its products through a new-generation launch.

These stand, for now, as only rumors (and not the first time they've surfaced at that), but paint a pretty interesting picture, nonetheless. Like Intel with its Coffee Lake series, pushing a product launch to earlier than expected has consequences: production, logistics, infrastructure, product roadmaps, and stock of existing previous-generation products must all be taken into account. And with NVIDIA just recently having introduced its performance-champions GTX 1080 Ti and Titan Xp graphics cards, all of this seems a trigger pull too early - especially when taking into account the competition landscape in high-performance graphics, which is akin to a single green-colored banner poised atop the Himalayas. And NVIDIA must not forget the fact that AMD could be pulling a black swan off its engineering department with Vega, like it did with its Ryzen series of CPUs.

AMD is on a roll with product launches lately, having just pushed out what is probably the most significant update in mainstream CPUs in years: the Ryzen 5 line of desktop processors. You can look over TPU's review of the 1500X and 1600X here and here. AMD is looking towards powering another central part of your desktop processor, though, with the impending launch of the RX 500 line of GPUs.

Confirmed as rebrands of previous-generation Polaris 10, the new RX 500 series will carry the new Polaris 20 XTX and Polaris 20 XL chips, which are expected to feature higher clocks (in the range of 1300-1400 MHz) from AIBs, before your own overclocking. PowerColor has officially confirmed the launch date as April 18th through social media with a tease for their new Red Devil graphics card. Now if only we could see Vega on this new horizon...

So, it would appear that rumors and leaks about the RX 500 series being simple rebrands of AMD's RX 400 line were true. Recent leaks point to no more changes and performance increases than those achieved through higher base clock speeds on the graphics cards' GPU and memory. The architecture is the same, and the process seems to have followed the same path - as of yet, no confirmation regarding whether or not these cards do use a newer, leaner LPP process for higher clocks and less power consumption.